Rick Sumner poses some interesting questions on his blog The Dilettante Exegete – during some of which he has an imaginary gun to his head! One that I think is particularly interesting is the question of what one ought to call the stance that there probably was a historical Jesus – the brother of the James whom Paul mentions meeting in his letter to the Galatians – but about whom we can say next to nothing, since the Gospel material... Read more
Fred Clark has a great post on magic tricks and the art of debate, which he starts off by saying ““Debate” is a parlor trick.” Here is a sample: When Ray Comfort challenges someone to a debate over the truth of Christianity, I wince because I am a Christian and I know that Comfort is most likely going to “lose” that debate, leading some to the mistaken conclusion that this indicates something meaningful about the truth or untruth of what... Read more
Via Unfundamentalist Christians on Facebook. If you don’t get the musical allusion, then you presumably need to listen to this: Read more
Via God of Evolution on Facebook Read more
David Hayward's latest cartoon will probably be controversial in some circles. But on one level, it reflects a very mainstream understanding of what happened in the early church. Jesus' followers thought he was destined to be king and restore the kingdom of David. They were so persuaded that, when the Romans crucified him, their belief system found a way of adapting, rather than merely abandoning that central conviction that Jesus was the chosen one. However much else one might wish... Read more
IO9 recently featured an interview with science-promoter Joe Rogan. If you didn't read all the way to the end, you missed his thoughts about religion: I think that the form of creationism that’s being promoted by fundamentalists today is incredibly simplistic, and it’s coming from a very simplistic mindset. These people, along with their ideas, get bogged down through control, through ideology, through fear, and all the different aspects of religion that are so unsavoury. But at the very root... Read more
I’ve long described Richard Carrier as the last, best hope for mythicism. While other mythicists have been content to self-publish shoddy pseudoscholarship online or elsewhere, Carrier has been a voice of sanity, recognizing that a scholarly consensus is not something to be treated lightly, and that, if there is to be a serious case for mythicism, it needs to be made by trained scholars approaching the matter in the appropriate scholarly manner. His book provisionally titled On the Historicity of... Read more
At a strategic planning meeting today related to technology at Butler University, a colleague mentioned his love/hate relationship with technology. I thought that there ought to be a term for this. Another colleague suggested technoambivalence, but that seems to be different than love and hate. So I suggested “misotechnophilia.” But does that term more readily refer to a love/hate relationship with technology, or to loving to hate technology? I think that anyone who has a love/hate relationship only with new... Read more
TheologyGrams shared this gem: I shared another Doctor Who-related diagram from that blog once before. There are several other wonderful items that have since appeared there, and so here are a couple more: Apophatic Theology Explained: How to work out where Mark’s Gospel ends: Read more
On the flight back from the UK, I had the chance to watch the movie Cloud Atlas. It really was spectacular, in many different ways. The story, told in different time periods which turn out to be interconnected, is enthralling, and the imagery of the two very different periods in the future is stunning. God is brought into things very early, by the intriguing question: If God made the world, then how do we know what we can change and... Read more
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